Philip TAYLOR wrote:
>> HTML 3.2 includes a widely deployed subset of the
> > specification given in RFC 1942 and can be used to
> > markup tabular material or for layout purposes.
>
> The last four words make it absolutely clear that
> layout was one of the intended uses of tables,
I think you are forgetting that 3.2 was documenting a fait accompli by
the vendors. The vendors have always tended towards wants rather than
needs. The market wanted a presentational language. 3.2 also
introduced font elements, if I remember correctly.
> abuse. All that aside, I suspect we all agree
> that achieving tabular layouts with tables is
> far easier than using CSS, and that what we need
But that is not fundamental. It's a limitation in current CSS. This
list should be considering futures, and the solution to CSS weaknesses
is not to build on the workarounds, but to fix, or replace, CSS.
(I still think that Adobe have got the better approach to writing
commercial documents with structural information, but they haven't
captured the imagination of the market, in the same way that HTML
captured its imagination when it started to be a poor imitation of PDF.
The PDF approach is to make the primary document be unashamedly
presentation, mark up structure inline when it aligns with presentation
and provide an alternative view of the document that shows the higher
level structure and indicates how the relevant low level structure plus
presentation components fit into the overall structure. This is tagged
PDF, used properly.)
>
--
David Woolley
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